02 May 2011

May 2011

Here is what it looked like Friday night in our sky at about 10:15p.m. The nice festive weather was not the only talk of the town thisweekend, that is for sure! The bluish-white streak of light with a greentail and red fragments was a fireball or bolide which raced east inabout 8 seconds. Here is a file picture of what a bolide actually lookslike. It lit the sky up and was much brighter than last month's supermoon. It was a simply stunning sight. We had several e-mails in fromCamden County Georgia last night of folks saying they have never seen ameteor that bright and it was so intense that a sonic boom was heardabout 2 minutes after it passed near the horizon. It did look like itmay have made it to the ground but there is no confirmation on this asof yet. It was seen as far west as Alabama and as far north as SouthCarolina!

This is a rare type of meteoroid or shooting star that happens when amuch larger space rock that meets our atmosphere. Usually meteoroids arethe size of grains of sand this one was likely larger and maybe thesize of one or two of my weather clickers which I showed on Good MorningJacksonville to give you some more perspective. The trailing reddishtail that seemed to be burning up was caused by this space rock ignitingdue to extreme friction when it met the earth's atmosphere traveling atclose to 100,000 mph! The blue and green colors tell us its chemicalcomposition was made of copper. The reddish color was a sign that it wasalso made of silicate.

This type of event is rare and only occurs about once every year. Thisweek we will keep our eyes to the sky for more shooting stars. We havethe Eta Aquarids meteor shower that peaks on Thursday night and Fridaymorning. Expect about 10 shooting stars per hour and they are known toalso leave fiery trails since these meteors making up this shower areknown to move at a whopping 150,000 mph. Make sure to look to the eastsoutheast about an hour or two before dawn on Friday morning. Thisshower is caused by the earth going through the dust trail of Halley'scomet which will not be visible to earth until mid-2061 and was lastseen our sky in 1986. Enjoy the show.

Nature is also lighting up the skies this week with more stormswhich are breaking out across some of the tornado ravaged areas of thedeep south. While severe weather is likely it will not be nearly aswidespread as last week. Here at home this weather system will warm usup to well above average temperatures over the next couple days. By timeit arrives late Tuesday night and Wednesday it looks like it will nothave much wind shear or moisture to work with limiting instability. Thismeans do not expect another squall line of storms, just isolated showeror thunderstorm activity.

If there is good news the long-range models for the rest of May keep ouraverage high temperatures at least closer to normal after our warmestApril in 9 years. More importantly rainfall should start picking up aswell and end closer to normal. This pattern change is being caused bymany factors including pressure changes across the globe. This includes amuch weaker Bermuda high pressure in the southeast and a stronger highpressure near Greenland. This set up brought us beneficial rains tostart the new year. This is welcome news but for this week no help forour plants but we will have a nice reinforcing shot of Spring weather bylate week!

Low horizontal trajectory with flaming tail. First thoughts it wasflame from aircraft engine but no noise then i could see it breaking orburning up over the sea. Did not think meteors would travel in whatseemed horizontal path in an easterly direction. - Nicholas Couts

Bahrain at approximately 9pm

My friend and I saw it in Bahrain at approximately 9pm. It was verybright and moving extremely quickly. At first we thought it might be afirework, but realised it was much too bright and fast moving. We westfacing west and it was moving in a north to south direction. Thefollowing day, I saw a programme on the History Channel about meteorsand meteorites and have no doubt what we saw was a very bright meteor. Regards, John

Janabiyah, Bahrain 9pm, 30th April 2011

My neighbors and I saw it approximately 9pm, 30th April 2011 in Bahrain.

I just thought it was a huge shooting star at first, but then myneighbors said it had to be a meteor. It was traveling horizontally inan easterly direction and quite slow, so there was enough time to see itproperly. It looked like a bright white fireball which had a tail andit eventually disintegrated and disappeared. We had never seen anythinglike this before., what an amazing experience! :) Regards, Anna

Bylo said...

i saw that fire ball .. but time was not 10:30 .. it's about 9:00pm .. and it was so clear and long ..same like this one

Mette said...

I saw that fire ball - white ball with a long tale and not 10:30 is was about 9:00 pm

Scott said...

Yep, we saw it too, same as described...definitely closer to 9:00than 10:30. We were looking east out toward the Pearl and it moved fromsouth to north across the horizon.

Anonymous said...

yes this was around 9pm and it's long clear fire ball in the sky.. great indeed..

The green fireball - which may be a natural phenomena - has been spotted all across the U.S.

AnIndiana couple driving along old Route 231 near McCutcheon High Schoolin Lafayette, watched a "very bright green-ish, glowing ball fallingtowards the Earth," according to May 1, 2011, testimony from the MutualUFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

"It scared both of us very bad, but was also exciting," the reportingwitness stated. "Instead on stopping and turning at our road to ourneighborhood, we decided to keep going down the road to see if we couldsee it again because it went behind the treeline."

Indiana is a current UFO ALERT 5 rating, with a low number of UFOsightings nationally. Indiana had 11 UFO reports in April 2011 - whileCalifornia had 46 sightings, the highest reporting state in the nation.Indiana is listed as a "Watch State" this month.

You can read more details about other recently reported cases at the UFO Examiner home page. The most up-to-date UFO information can be heard at web radio show UFO Traffic Reportevery Wednesday, 9 - 10:30 p.m. EST, which includes a UFO WitnessTestimony Program segment, and an update of the UFO ALERT nationalrating system. Past shows are available at the Archive page.

The following is the unedited and as yet uninvestigated report filedwith MUFON. Please keep in mind that most UFO reports can be explainedas something natural or manmade. If Indiana MUFON State Director Stewart Hill investigates and reports back on this case, I will release an update. Please report UFO activity to MUFON.com.

Me my husband and my daughter wer driving home on old 231 heading towardmccution high school in lafayette indiana and we were about to make aleft turn into our neighborhood when all of a sudden we both saw to orright way up in the sky a a veryyyy bright greenish glowing ball fallingtowards the eath.

As it was happening both me and my husband just kept saying OMG!OMG! Itscared both of us very bad but was also exciting.Instead on stoping andturning at our road to our neighborhood we decided to keep going downthe road to see if we could see it again because it had went behind thetreeline.

We drove up the road to a clear spot and stoped on the side of the roadto see if it would show up again.It never showed up again though.WEended up going bach home and the whole rest of the night I kept gettinggoosebumps.This happened at exactly 11:30pm.

A Jacksonville, FL, witness reports watching a "green fireball falldown to Earth" at 10:05 p.m. on April 29, 2011, according to testimonyfrom the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

"I was jogging toward the north when, in the corner of my eye, I saw agreen flash in the sky," the witness stated. "I stopped to watch as myfirst instinct was that it might be a passenger jet with a seriousproblem. For about 5 seconds I watched a green fireball fall down to theEarth. This was toward the west. The event only lasted about 5 secondsbefore it disappeared in a bright flash."

No images or videos were included with the MUFON report, whichwas filed on April 29, 2011. Jacksonville is the largest city inFlorida, in Duval County, population 821,784.

Florida is a current UFO ALERT 3 rating, with a high number of UFOsightings nationally. Florida had 23 UFO reports in March 2011 - whileCalifornia had 45 sightings, the highest reporting state in the nation.

You can read more details about other recently reported cases at the UFO Examiner home page. The most up-to-date UFO information can be heard at web radio show UFO Traffic Reportevery Wednesday, 9 - 10:30 p.m. EST, which includes a UFO WitnessTestimony Program segment, and an update of the UFO ALERT nationalrating system. Past shows are available at the Archive page.

I was out jogging threw my neighborhood at about 10:05 on 4/29/2011 herein JAX FL U.S.A. I was jogging toward the North when in the corner ofmy eye I saw a green flash in the sky , I stopped to watch as my firstinstinct was that it might be a passenger jet with a serious problem.For about 5 seconds I watched a green fireball fall down to the Earth,this was toward the west. The event only lasted about 5 seconds beforeit disappeared in a bright flash.

After seeing the first event I then turned around now heading south in ahurry to get my family outside in case there was more to see. I thennoticed a pastel colored object that resembled a symmetrical gatheringof light bubbles. I then watched this for about 15 seconds before itdisappeared.

A few things to note, we get a lot of air traffic here where I live and Iam very use to seeing aircraft of all types as I go walking at nightoften. This includes shooting stars as well.

Also early on about 2 minutes or so before I viewed the fireball Inoticed a group of lights which resembled a plan heading south thatperformed a sharp U-turn to the north/west. It seemed to sharp a turnfor your average passenger plane.

Ameteorite weighing about a kilogramme smashed into the roof of aMasurian agro-tourism farm in the village of Sołtmany, near Kruklanki,northern Poland.

Nobody was hurt but some damage was done to the roof.

Parts of the meteorite, which descended on Saturday causing some damageto a barn roof, was recovered by astronomers from Olsztyn, and will beexamined by Professor Tadeusz Przylibski from Wrocław TechnicalUniversity. Then it will be handed over to the Nicolas Copernicus Museumin Frombork or to the Planetarium in Olsztyn.

The meteorite, the biggest piece of which is about the size of a humanfist, has also caused a stir in the Polish scientific community as it isthe first planetoid fragment in 17 years to be recovered immediatelyafter its fall to Earth.

Probably the specimen is a chondrite, a fairly common type of meteorite,derived from the belt of planetoids between Mars and Jupiter.

The last time Polish researchers recovered a chondriticmeteorite immediately after it fell was in 1994, in Baszkówka nearWarsaw.

This was also Poland's only chondrite which did not fall apart after its passage through Earth's atmosphere.

Valdosta - A meteorite or space debris may have been the cause offireballs reportedly seen in South Georgia skies Friday night and theresulting impact felt from one end of Lowndes County to the other.

Meanwhile, similar reports of fireballs were filed throughout the stateand in other states, according to the American Meteor Society.

The Lowndes County 911 Center reported Saturday that an exact cause ofthe phenomenon was never located. Authorities received several callsFriday night reporting debris landing in specific regions, but nothingwas ever located.

Moody Air Force Base reported no sonic booms, an effect caused when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier, and no downed planes.

The reports started at approximately 10 p.m. Friday. Authorities continued responding to related calls reportedly past midnight.

Officials believe space debris may have been the cause of thedisturbance, said Paige Dukes, Lowndes County public informationofficer.

The majority of 911 calls came from south Lowndes County as peoplereported seeing either a fiery object or fiery objects falling from theskies. People also reported a "boom" or series of "booms" rattlingwindows and shaking houses.

Some people reported sounds similar to tapping on their windows, a pounding on doors, or a limb falling on a roof.

These lights and booms were not isolated to south LowndesCounty. Authorities also received reports up through north LowndesCounty. On Facebook, posters reported seeing the lights in Albany,feeling the impact in Cook and Echols counties.

Yet, the reports of a fireball Friday night were not simply a SouthGeorgia occurrence. The American Meteor Society clocked numerous reportsof a fireball seen through Georgia, Florida, Alabama and the

Carolinas. These accounts all occurred within a 15-minute period from 10-10:15 p.m. Friday throughout all of these states.

The society website includes reports from the sightings in Valdosta and Ray City.

"Night time so didn't see smoke however the fire ... trail was the mostimpressive thing I've ever seen," wrote the unidentified Ray Cityobserver. "The head was white, followed by red and yellow edges andtail. - 10 seconds after pass over we heard a 'sonic' boom."

A Valdosta resident wrote on the Society site: "My gaze was first drawnto the sky by fast, white ... flashing which I mistook for lightningreflected off the trees/ground/house next to me, even though I knewthere was zero cloud cover and lightning was highly improbable. Iimmediately looked straight up. My initial impression on seeing thisfireball was that I was seeing a stray firework that had never explodedand was errantly shooting over me ... I doubted that this was a realmeteor until I heard a boom several seconds later. ... It did not soundlike it came from the sky, but rather from a point on the easternhorizon past my line of sight (and also obstructed from my view). ..."

Another Valdosta witness posted on the AMS site: "... was very brightand much larger than any other shower I have ever witnessed, by far thelargest and brightest I've ever seen. It disappeared in the atmosphereso that leads me to believe it was a fireball. Hard to describe,happened so fast. The body I know was orange and white. Only noticed itbecause I could see blue lights reflected off the back of my car and Ithought it was police lights and looked up and saw it. Still not toosure if that's what it was though."

Dr. Martha Leake, a Valdosta State University professor who teachesastronomy and earned her doctorate in planetary sciences, said thephenomenon could possibly be a meteorite or space debris.

A bolide sometimes does explode upon entering the atmosphere and lookslike it is burning, she said. A bolide is a meteor-type that is oftenconsidered synonymous with "fireball;" usually this term is used for avery bright fireball.

Or it could have been space debris, a term referring to orbitinghuman-created items that no longer serve any purpose. These itemsoccasionally return to earth.

Space debris usually appears as a burning trail of objects coming through the atmosphere, the VSU professor said.

This week, from May 4-8, a meteor shower should be clearly visible inSouth Georgia's sky during the early morning hours, but that may have noconnection as a possible cause for Friday night's occurrence.

She is merely speculating on possibilities based on reports given to herby The Times. Leake was unaware of the reports until The Times calledher Saturday afternoon.

However, at approximately 10 p.m. Friday, she heard what sounded like atree limb landing on her roof. But like so many other people who heardsomething Friday night, she found everything secure while the cause ofthe impact remained unexplained.

Anasteroid a little smaller than the CN Tower is hurtling toward earthand astronomers have their cameras ready for a spectacular glimpse.

Called 2005 YU55, the asteroid will nudge closer to earth than the moon, passing by just 325,000 kilometres away.

Although modern technology will give astronomers the best-ever look atthe travelling piece of cosmological history, there is no fear it willactually smack into earth.

"At one time we had classified 2005 YU55 as a potential threat," saidSteve Chesley, a scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory'sNear-Earth Object Program Office.

Radar tracking last month, with the asteroid 2.3 million kilometresaway, meant "we were able to rule impacts out entirely for the next 100years."

Asteroids have been this close before. But "nobody has seenasteroid 2055 YU55 at four-metre resolution yet," JPL scientist LanceBenner told the Star in an email.

"We did not have the foreknowledge and technology to take advantage ofthe opportunity," said JPL scientist Barbara Wilson "When it flies past,it should be a great opportunity for science instruments on the groundto get a good look."

YU55 is due to arrive "from a sunward direction" on Nov. 8 and the best time to see it will be later that day and into Nov. 9.

"This is a C-type asteroid, and those are thought to be representativeof the primordial materials from which our solar system was formed,"Wilson said in a NASA release.

"This flyby will be an excellent opportunity to test how we study,document and quantify which asteroids would be most appropriate for afuture human mission."

A long-distance view in 2010 revealed "a dark, rocky object with acomposition similar to those of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites," saidBenner.

This time, "we might see large boulders, possibly craters, hills andvalleys and perhaps some features that haven't been seen before."

Once again, on May 7, 2011, Georgia's night skies are lit up by a bright meteor - also known as a Bolide or Fireball.

On the night of Monday May 2, 2011, sightings of a bright meteorappearing over Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and other states were reportedto news stations and meteor reporting organizations.According to the reports, around 10:00 PM EST a very bright meteor madeits appearance high in Earth's atmosphere and produced quite a lightshow for those fortunate enough to witness the event. Five day's later;Georgia was once again visited again by another bright Bolide. This timeit was captured on video.

A Sandia National Laboratories Fireball Camera, located in Ty Ty, Georgia on the site of the Red Barn Observatorywas able to capture this particular event. The meteor appeared on May7, 2011 at 1:01 AM EST and lasted for nearly seven seconds beforefinally "burning out" near the eastern horizon. As of now, no otherobservations of this fireball have been reported.

2011 Eta Aquarids - Meteor Shower

During the Month of May each year, the Eta Aquarids, a meteor showerthat peaks each year on May 5th, provides spectators an opportunity toobserve meteors as they enter the Earths atmosphere - producing a streamof light and often a smoke trail. While it is possible that thisparticular fireball could have been associated with the Eta Aquaridmeteor shower, it's more likely that this meteor was a sporadic meteor.Eta Aquarids are extremely fast meteors and last night's fireballappeared to move very slow.

Bolides and Meteors

Bolides, meteors that produce a flash or outburst, are not as common asthe "standard" meteor that can be seen on a near-nightly basis. Onaverage, five to six meteors can be observed per hour under clear, darkskies - whereas bolides average about one per month. Bright bolides,similar to the one that were observed on May 2, only average about oneper year. The Bolide that entered the atmosphere over Georgia on May 7is slightly more common and can be observed three to four times peryear.

Meteoroids are generally described as the leftover fragments from thetime our Solar System was created. Once they enter Earth's atmosphereand we see the trail of light they produce, they are known as Meteors.Those that are lucky enough to make it to Earth's surface are known as aMeteorite.

Observing Meteors

With two bright meteors in only a week and the Eta Aquarid meteor showerending, this could be a great time to get out and watch the night skiesfor meteors. Observing meteors is simple. Find a comfortable spotoutside away from bright lights, relax, and watch the night skies. Whilethe Eta Aquarids are coming to an end, there's still the opportunity tosee sporadic meteors and possibly that rare Bolide!

Astudy has suggested that comets blasting gases out of its icy crustcould have created the unique atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan.

Several theories have come up earlier behind the origin of Titansnitrogen-rich air. Titan is the only moon in the solar system with muchatmosphere.

Some theories suggest that volcanic activity might have belched it out,or sunlight may have broken up a primordial atmosphere's ammoniamolecules. But these suggestions assume that the young Titan was a warmworld, whereas measurements by the Cassini spacecraft imply that Titanhas always been fairly cold.

The latest idea is that the atmosphere was created 3.9 billion years agoin a period known as the late heavy bombardment, when comets swarmedthrough the solar system.

"Huge amounts of cometary bodies would have collided with outer icysatellites, including Titan," New Scientist quoted Yasuhito Sekine ofthe University of Tokyo, Japan, as saying.

To mimic the effects of such high-speed impacts, Sekine and hiscolleagues fired projectiles into a mixture of ammonia and water icesimilar to Titan's crust.

The impacts converted some of the ammonia into nitrogen gas, andSekine's team calculated that ancient comet impacts could have liberatedenough nitrogen to build Titan's atmosphere.

You may have heard the news: Comet Elenin is coming to theinner-solar system this fall. Comet Elenin (also known by itsastronomical name C/2010 X1), was first detected on Dec. 10, 2010 byLeonid Elenin, an observer in Lyubertsy, Russia, who made the discovery"remotely" using the ISON-NM observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico. Atthe time of the discovery, the comet was about 647 million kilometers(401 million miles) from Earth. Over the past four-and-a-half months,the comet has - as comets do - closed the distance to Earth'svicinity as it makes its way closer to perihelion (its closest point tothe sun). As of May 4, Elenin's distance is about 274 million kilometers(170 million miles).

"That is what happens with these long-period comets that come in fromway outside our planetary system," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-EarthObject Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,Calif. "They make these long, majestic, speedy arcs through our solarsystem, and sometimes they put on a great show. But not Elenin. Rightnow that comet looks kind of wimpy."

How does a NASA scientist define cometary wimpiness?

"We're talking about how a comet looks as it safely flies past us," saidYeomans. "Some cometary visitors arriving from beyond the planetaryregion - like Hale-Bopp in 1997 -- have really lit up the night skywhere you can see them easily with the naked eye as they safely transitthe inner-solar system. But Elenin is trending toward the other end ofthe spectrum. You'll probably need a good pair of binoculars, clearskies, and a dark, secluded location to see it even on its brightestnight."

Comet Elenin should be at its brightest shortly before the timeof its closest approach to Earth on Oct. 16 of this year. At itsclosest point, it will be 35 million kilometers (22 million miles) fromus. Can this icy interloper influence us from where it is, or where itwill be in the future? What about this celestial object inspiring someshifting of the tides or even tectonic plates here on Earth? There havebeen some incorrect Internet speculations that external forces couldcause comet Elenin to come closer.

"Comet Elenin will not encounter any dark bodies that could perturb itsorbit, nor will it influence us in any way here on Earth," said Yeomans."It will get no closer to Earth than 35 million kilometers [about 22million miles]."

"Comet Elenin will not only be far away, it is also on the small sidefor comets," said Yeomans. "And comets are not the most densely-packedobjects out there. They usually have the density of something akin toloosely packed icy dirt.

"So you've got a modest-sized icy dirtball that is getting no closerthan 35 million kilometers," said Yeomans. "It will have an immeasurablyminiscule influence on our planet. By comparison, my subcompactautomobile exerts a greater influence on the ocean's tides than cometElenin ever will."

Yeomans did have one final thought on comet Elenin.

"This comet may not put on a great show. Just as certainly, it will notcause any disruptions here on Earth. But there is a cause to marvel,"said Yeomans. "This intrepid little traveler will offer astronomers achance to study a relatively young comet that came here from well beyondour solar system's planetary region. After a short while, it will beheaded back out again, and we will not see or hear from Elenin forthousands of years. That's pretty cool."

NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passingrelatively close to Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes.The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called"Spaceguard," discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them,and predicts their paths to determine if any could be potentiallyhazardous to our planet.

What if a giant asteroid crashed into the area near your home?Scientists have come up with an 'impact effects calculator' that letsyou work out what would happen if an asteroid hits our planet.

Users can type in the size of their hypothetical asteroid, its speed,what it will hit, its angle of entry and even how far they are from theblast, the Daily Mail reported.

For those who cannot visualise how big their asteroid could be, there iseven a helpful drop-down menu of pre-set sizes which include 'schoolbus', 'humpback whale', 'Empire State Building', all the way up to theominous-sounding 'small planet'.

The website's algorithms then calculate what the effects of theasteroid's impact would be on the earth's axis, whether there would be afireball - and what chance of surviving any bystanders would have.

It even tells you how far you should be from the impact to avoid beingburied in the material thrown up from any crater that is left behind.

The website, called Impact Earth!, is the brainchild ofscientists from Purdue University in the US and Imperial College London.

It is an update of a calculator which was originally devised in 2004 and based on scientifically-sound calculations.

The new version includes extra elements such as the height of resultingtsunami waves and it comes with an entertaining animation that shows theasteroid hurtling from space towards the earth.

The asteroid is identical to the Hartley 2 comet that NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft flew by last week.

Imperial College's Gareth Collins told the BBC: "One of the major newadditions is the estimates for tsunami wave height at a given distanceaway from an ocean impact."

On average, an object about the size of a car will enter the earth'satmosphere once a year, producing a spectacular fireball in the sky.

An asteroid collision with the earth is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

When an asteroid or comet impacts a planet, the explosion ejects hugeamounts of material, sending it flying in all directions. But there arealso plumes of material, long fingers of rock and dust that stream outas well. The boulders and such inside this plume then fall back to theground, making liner chains of secondary craters. We see lots of theseon our Moon, moons in the outer solar system, and Mercury, too.

If these features are long enough, it's inevitable two chains from twodifferent primary craters would cross somewhere. And it turns out thishas been seen... but where?

ThisMESSENGER image of Mercury shows exactly that: two crater chains fromtwo separate impacts crossing over each other (and a third, shorterchain is at the bottom, too). They're almost exactly perpendicular toeach other, which is cool, and the intersection happens to lie in a big,shallow crater about 120 km (72 miles) across that fills this image.Unfortunately, MESSENGER hasn't been orbiting Mercury long enough tohave surveyed the whole planet yet, so I wasn't able to find the sourcecraters of these two chains.

Interestingly, both chains have elongated craters at theirends, one on the upper left and the other at the top. That indicates avery low-angle impact; anything hitting the ground from an angle aboveabout 10° tends to make a circular crater. However, the one on the leftappears to be right on the big crater's rim, so the elongation may bedue to the ground angle changing. The other may be coincidence; both arefar too small to have been the source craters for the chains.

I'm not sure there's any real scientific value in knowing these craterchains intersect or examining the intersection in detail. Still. They'refun to look at, fun to explore, and they're just seriously nifty.

No coffee? No problem. To wake up any morning this week, all you needto do is look out the window. Mars, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury arealigning in the eastern sky for a spectacular dawn conjunction. MarianoRibas photographed the gathering on May 9th from his home in BuenosAires, Argentina:

"Itwas an awesome morning with an unforgettable view: four planets packedin just a 7º piece of sky," says Ribas. "The very compactVenus-Mercury-Jupiter triangle was simply hypnotic. And Mars, belowthem, was faint but still clearly visible to naked eye. Marvelousplanetary gathering, but the best is yet to come."

Indeed, on May 11th, Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets in theSolar System, will converge to form a pair less than 1/2 degree apart.Set your alarm for Wednesday morning and begin the day with aneye-opener--no caffeine required.

A picture of a UFO was taken yesterday by a photographer in Melrose,Scotland. The photographer, who asked to remain anonymous, supplied theUFO photo to the Border Telegraph. He described the object inthe picture as "moving pretty fast at around 45 degrees towards the sky- as you can see by the close up it appears to have a tail showing thedirection." The Border Telegraph contacted both the Met Office(the UK's national weather service) and the Ministry of Defence (MOD)to see if either group could shed any light on the UFO in question. TheMet Office had no record of a weather balloon in the area, and the MODdeclined to comment.

FireballUFOs certainly aren't a new phenomenon, and they have been seen allaround the world. While meteorites and other debris entering Earth'satmosphere can account for some of the observed fireball objects, someof these UFOs reportedly display unusual behavior like directionalchanges, shape-shifting, and color changes.

The cameraman who photographed the fireball in Scotland doesn't know what he saw, but he told the Border Telegraph, "It was probably nothing, but I still don't understand what could explain something like that in the sky."

Virginia Beach is a city full of sound. Waves crash at the Oceanfrontand fighter jets scream overhead. However, a boom Tuesday night caughthundreds of normally unfazed residents from Virginia Beach to theEastern Shore completely off-guard.

"It shook my house," said one man.

"It almost felt like an earthquake and then I had to think about it.We're in Virginia Beach we don't get earthquakes," said Pam Trotter.

10 On Your Side called the military, the U.S. Geological Survey and theDepartment of Energy. Turns out the answer may be found out of thisworld.

"It's most consistent with a meteor coming into the Earth's atmosphereand creating a large sonic boom," said NASA scientist Dr. Joe Zawodny.

Dr. Zawodny said sonic booms are not uncommon. Two years ago, hundredsof people across the region heard a similar boom most likely caused by ameteor.

This just happens to be a popular time of year for them said Dr. Zawodny.

"We're on the tail end of a meteor shower here which peaked last week. It could be associated with that," he said.

It is easy for some to blame the jets. "With the jets and everythingflying they're always setting off car alarms and things like that withthe military base who knows, you know?" said one bike vendor.

Some things actually do make more noise.

"The first thing I did was look up in the sky and check, thought itmight be a meteor or something but I didn't see anything," said Trotter.

Dr. Zawodny said even something as small as a golf ball could cause a big boom if was traveling fast.

The seconds-long reverberation at approximately 7:20 p.m. Tuesday sentneighbors to porches, piqued slumbering pets and launched a thousandtheories. But nobody can say for sure what it was - not police orseismologists or meteorologists or NASA or Oceana Naval Air Station orthe Virginia National Guard.

People reported feeling it from Suffolk to Newport News to the EasternShore and beyond. The intensity of the grumble was perhaps greatest inVirginia Beach, where five calls came in to 911 and firefighters set outin search of the source of an explosion.

None was found, said Lori Stiles, communications operations manager forthe city. She felt it, too, from her home in Dam Neck, a sensation likethat of an approaching storm that caused the house to creak.

Dawn West thought for sure she was in the midst of anearthquake at her home in the Bayview area of Norfolk, and she ought toknow: "I was in the great quake of 1989 in San Francisco," she wrote inan email, "and yes, the feelings come right up when we heard and feltwhat we did last evening!"

Only it wasn't anything seismic, as far as the U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center can tell.

"I don't know what it's related to," said John Bellini, a geophysicistat the Golden, Colo., center. "We get a lot of reports like this out ofnorthern North Carolina and along the southern coast of Virginia, andwe're not usually able to determine the cause."

Bellini said he's heard of military bombing off the coast. "I'm notsaying that's what it was, but these types of reports seem to come up alot in that area."

Two seismographs in Richmond and Virginia Beach might have held theanswer. But both were offline Tuesday evening. Richmond's machine,operated by Virginia Tech, was experiencing power problems. TidewaterCommunity College had shut its seismograph off at its Beach campusbecause of nearby construction.

Doug Otto felt his house on 70th Street in Virginia Beach rattle at 7:19 p.m. for a good five seconds: "This is literally earthshaking - like a giant picked up your house and just sat it down."

It did shift his empty hot tub about 6 inches, Otto said. "Itried to jump on it to put it back down. I'm 200 pounds and can't getthe thing to budge."

His Google search on seismic activity turned up nothing, of course.

"I'm sitting there thinking of conspiracy theories," he said. "Maybe the Navy is working on some new stealth thing."

Basically, an explosion a couple of miles offshore could be heard onland because sound waves can travel great distances over water, heexplained. "I don't know what causes it, but I suspect it might havesomething to do with the military."

If all else fails, it seems, blame the military.

Patrick Daugherty, who lives off Birdneck Road in Virginia Beach, said he heard no planes take off or land.

"Normally on Tuesday, the jet noise occurs every few minutes. All Iheard within the hour was a few helicopters coasting in the distance,"Daugherty wrote in an email. "I just want to know what that was and getto the bottom of it."

That is unlikely, if history is any indication.

In late March 2009, dozens of people reported bright lights in the skyand a boom that shuddered houses in Norfolk and Virginia Beach.

Scientists said it was most likely a part of a rocket or a meteor falling to Earth.

But nobody knows for sure.

The Pilot's Mike Hixenbaugh and Meredith Kruse contributed to this report.

Township officials believe a small meteorite impacted the front lawnof a township home last Friday morning at about 11:35 a.m., creating atrench and spewing dirt and debris on the lawn, driveway and street nearthe residence.

The residents were not home at the time, members of the TownshipCommittee said when discussing the event at Tuesday night's meeting,although police later said the homeowner was on the property, but heardnothing. No one was injured, Township Mayor John Malay and otherofficials said.

The address of the home has not been released. However, TownshipCommitteeman John Carpenter said the home is in the southern end of thetownship.

A trench created on a township lawn believed to have been created by a small meteorite. No One was injured, officials said.

An official police report issued on Wednesday said police hadresponded at about 2:26 p.m. to a report of property damage to aresidence located along the Mount Airy Road corridor, south of LyonsRoad. Police said they are withholding the address for the privacy ofthe residents.

Sgt. Scott Ward arrived at the home and observed a hole in the ground atthe front of the property, police said. The hole was approximatelyseven feet long, four feet wide and 18 inches deep, according to thepolice report.

In addition, dirt and rock debris were strewn approximately 100 feetfrom the hole, police said. Police said the homeowner stated that he hadbeen home all day and did not see or hear anything that he believed mayhave caused the hole. The homeowner noticed the hole at about 2:15p.m., according to police.

Township home where the lawn is believed to have been hit by a small meteorite on Friday, May 6th.

Neighboringresidents were also questioned and none of those neighbors reportedseeing or hearing anything out of the ordinary. The following agenciesresponded to investigate what may have caused the hole: Liberty Cornerfire chief Peter Aprahamian, Public Service Electric & Gas andJersey Central Power & Light. It was determined that no gas lines orunderground electrical wires were in the area and therefore notresponsible for creating the trench.

Malay said no trace of a meteorite was found, but the material may havedisintegrated upon impact. "It must have been traveling pretty darnfast," he said.

In order to rule out the possibility that an explosive device wasresponsible for creating the hole, the New Jersey State Police BombSquad was contacted and responded to the residence. The NJSP Bomb Squaddetermined that no evidence of an explosive device was present.

A comet dove into the sun on May 11th and seemed to trigger a massiveeruption--emphasis on seemed. Watch the movie below, then scroll downfor further discussion.

A comet goes in; a CME comes out. Coincidence? Probably, yes, thesequence was coincidental. The comet disintegrated as much as a millionkilometers above the stellar surface. There's no known way that thewispy, vaporous remains of a relatively lightweight comet could cause abillion-ton cloud of hot plasma to fly away from the sun at 400 km/s(the observed speed of the CME). Moreover, NASA's Solar DynamicsObservatory photographed the eruption that did propel the CME intospace. There's no comet in the field of view of this must-see movie.

Bonus: The bright comet pictured above had a dim companion. Can you find it?

Comment: Unfortunately, Space Weather'scommentator does not take into account the idea that there is anelectrical discharge phenomena taking place here which can easilyexplain why the eruption began before the physical arrival of the comet.If a comet in the far reaches of the solar system can induce Solardischarge events - which is part of the Electric Universe theory - thencertainly, a discharge event can begin to manifest as the cometapproaches.

Basically, electrons' movement is slightly retarded in the Sun's corona,with solar flares hurling out an excess number of protons. The excessprotons in the solar wind creates a separation of charge throughout theentire solar system - a giant capacitor with a positively charged,doughnut-shaped nebular cloud of dust and gases stretching to the farreaches of the solar system, and the negatively charged the surface ofthe Sun. An electrical potential exists between these two poles and anyobject moving through plasma regions of varying charge density willbecome charged, depending on its size and relative velocity.When new bodies (e.g., comets) enter this plasma region from outerspace, they ignite and begin to discharge the solar capacitor.

Given the electrical nature of the Sun and comets, there is likely more than just "coincidence" at play here.

A Romanian man planting potatoes almost died when a meteoritebelieved to be from the tale of Halley's Comet thudded into the groundinches from where he was working.

Dumitru Zvanca, 58, said: "I heard a brief whoosh of air and thensomething hit the ground just to one side of me with an enormous thud. Ididn't see a meteor, but I saw the small crater of earth it made andwhatever had hit the ground had sunk into the earth.

"I thought there might be more so I ran inside and waited until the next day - then I went out and dug it up."

The gardener from Suharau commune, in Botosani country in northernRomania contacted geologist Sorin Grindei, from Botosani, who said: "Ithad fallen 50-70 centimetres into the garden. It was like a black roundball, like a pool ball.

"The meteorite ended up in two equally sized halves and he keptone - the other has been sent for tests at the Geology Faculty in Lasi.

"Mr Zvanca saw a very rare event - many people see falling stars butonly rarely do people get a chance to see it so up close and personal.

"In the period when it happened - 3-5 May - there was a meteor shower and we think it may be a part of Halley's Comet tail."

Manager of the Botosani Environmental Protection Agency, Dana Boariu,said: "Tests confirm it is a micro-meteorite, 7 cm wide and it is notradioactive."

Specialists say that the meteorite had been 10 times bigger when itentered the atmosphere but had been burned as it fell to earth.

Thisphoto provided by the Bernards Police Department shows a hole in thefront yard of a home in the Basking Ridge section of the township.

"It'sjust really, really weird," said Jerry Vinski, director of nearbyRaritan Valley Community College's planetarium, who conducted tests onthe site. "We dug around and couldn't find anything. We used metaldetectors because all meteors have metal in them, and we couldn't findanything, large or small."

Bernards Township Police Capt. Edward Byrnes said whatever hit the frontyard in the Basking Ridge section left a crater about 18 inches deepand roughly the size of a coffee table. Rocks and soil were scatteredaround the yard and driveway.

A State Police bomb squad ruled out explosives, Byrnes said.

According to Byrnes, no one in the neighborhood heard or saw anything atthe time of the May 6 incident. The homeowner called police uponarriving home.

"The weather was clear, there were no reports of lightning strikes;nobody reported seeing anything," Byrnes said. "I've never seen anythinglike this in 23 years."

A map view of Lafayette Lane, where officials are trying to figure out what caused a mysterious hole to appear in the ground.

Vinskisaid that the hole could have been caused by an object falling from aplane. He said if the object was a meteorite, the impact would have beensignificant and would have been felt nearby.

"When you see meteor showers in the upper atmosphere, they're traveling50 miles a second," he said. "Even if it's slowing down through theatmosphere, you're still going to have a sonic boom. And it would haveleft something behind, it wouldn't have completely disintegrated."

NASAcaptured a stunning video showing this fairly bright white comet as itdove towards the Sun -- and was never heard from again.

NASA's solar observatory captured a stunning video of a cometstreaking towards the sun between Tuesday and Wednesday -- and theaftermath when it collided with the tremendous ball of plasma.

The video, captured by NASA's Solar & Heliospheric Observatory(SOHO), appears to show a fireball jet out following the collision.That's not quite what happened, NASA explained. Instead, a coronal massejection coincidentally blasted out to the right just as the cometapproaches and is vaporized by the sun.

The comet is probably part of the Kreutz family -- remnants of a singlegiant comet that broke up many centuries ago, and crash against itssurface from time to time. It was discovered by amateur astronomerSergey Shurpakov, the space agency said.

In this coronagraph, an opaque disk blocks the glare of the sun like anartificial eclipse, revealing faint objects that no Earth-boundtelescope could possibly see. It's intended to allow scientists to viewthe faint structures in the sun's corona -- but it also revealssungrazing comets like this one.

NASA has discovered hundreds of such comets over the years --but none that have ended their existence in such an eye-opening fashion.In late December, 2010, the sun dealt with an entire storm of icycomets that dove into its heart and died a similar, fiery death.

"The storm began on Dec 13th and ended on the 22nd," said Karl Battamsof the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC. "During that time, theSolar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) detected 25 comets diving intothe sun. It was crazy!"

Scientists have yet to find a convincing physical connection betweensun-grazing comets and coronal mass ejections, according to NASA.

Comment: Most of what the reader will find in this article are misinformed opinions and ad hominemattacks directed at those scientists who have the gall to mention thereality of comet catastrophes. This is not entirely surprising giventhe attacks that other Catastrophists have endured in the past.

The interested reader may want to compare what's written here to theactual evidence amassed by Firestone, et al. described in this article:

An elegant archaeological theory, under fire for results that can't be replicated, may ultimately come undone.

It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: thedisappearance of what are arguably North America's first people. Aspeeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes,spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing the Clovis peopleand the mammoths they fed on, and plunging the region into a deep chill.The idea so captivated the public that three movies describing thecatastrophe were produced.

But now, four years after the purportedly supportive evidence wasreported, a host of scientific authorities systematically have made thecase that the comet theory is "bogus." Researchers from multiplescientific fields are calling the theory one of the most misguided ideasin the history of modern archaeology, which begs for an independentreview so an accurate record is reflected in the literature.

"It is an impossible scenario," says Mark Boslough,a physicist at Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., where he tapsthe world's fastest computers for nuclear bomb experiments to study suchimpacts. His computations show the debris from such a comet couldn'tcover the proposed impact field. In March, a "requiem" for the theoryeven was published by a group that included leading specialists fromarchaeology to botany.

Yet, the scientists who described the alleged impact in ahallowed U.S. scientific journal refuse to consider the critics'evidence - insisting they are correct, even though no one canreplicate their work: the hallmark of credibility in the scientificworld.

The primary authors of the theory are an unusual mix: James Kennett, a virtual father of marine geology from the University of California, Santa Barbara; Richard Firestone, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California; and Allen West, an unknown academic from the mining industry who lives in Dewey, Ariz.

"We are under a lot of duress," said Kennett. "It has been quitepainful." So much so, that team members call their critics' work"biased," "nonsense" and "screwed up."

Such intransigence has been seen before in other cases of grandscientific claims. Sometimes those theories were based on datairregularities. Other times, the proponents succumbed to self-delusion.But typically, advocates become so invested in their ideas they can'tpublicly acknowledge error.

A new look at the comet claim suggests all of these phenomena may be inplay, apparently creating a peculiar bond of desperation as the theorycame under increasing attack. Indeed, the team's established scientistsare so wedded to the theory they have opted to ignore the fact theircolleague "Allen West" isn't exactly who he says he is.

West is Allen Whitt - who, in 2002, was fined by California andconvicted for masquerading as a state-licensed geologist when he chargedsmall-town officials fat fees for water studies.

Comment: According to the link:

An investigation by the Board for Geologists and Geophysicists (BGG) hasled to the convictions in San Bernardino County Superior Court of twomen on charges of obtaining money by false pretenses (pursuant to P.C.532(A)). The Board's inquiry concluded that Kevin Lee Jonker and AllenWhitt had practiced geophysics without a license. A thirdindividual, Richard Van Blaricom, surrendered his geophysicist's licenseon April 25 as a result of the same investigation (see previous Enforcement Action posting).

The Board's investigation concluded that in April 1999, Van Blaricomsigned his name and stamped a groundwater supply survey report for theJoshua Basin Water District near Palm Springs that was in fact preparedby Jonker and Whitt. Neither was licensed to practice geophysics forothers. State law prohibits licensees of the BGG from signing and usingtheir Registered Geophysicist stamp on reports they do not supervise orprepare themselves.

While it certainly sounds like Whitt/West displayed poor judgment, this other documentmakes it sound like Blaricom was actually the one at fault when he"aided and abetted" Whitt and Jonker "to act as Licensed Geophysicistsand/or Registered Geologists in the data collection, interpretation, andpreparation of a groundwater survey report." The interaction betweenthese three men is a little unclear making the accusation against Whittweak at best.

In any case, one should note the desperation of the ScientificEstablishment in their attempt to discredit the groundbreakingimplications of West's work by such a vague accusation.

After completing probation in 2003 in San Bernardino County, hebegan work on the comet theory, legally adopting his new name in 2006 ashe promoted it in a popular book. Only when questioned by this reporterlast year did his co-authors learn his original identity and legalhistory. Since then, they have not disclosed it to the scientificcommunity.

West's history - and new concerns about study results he wasintegrally involved in - raise intriguing questions about the veracityof the comet claim. His background is likely to create more doubtsabout the theory. And the controversy - because it involves thepolitically sensitive issue of a climate shift - is potentially morebroadly damaging, authorities suggest.

"It does feed distrust in science," says Wallace Broecker,a geochemist at Columbia University and an international dean ofclimate research. "Those who don't believe in human-produced globalwarming grab onto it."

West is at the nexus of almost all the evidence for the original cometclaims. His fieldwork is described in the 2006 book he authored withFirestone, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes.

To show the comet's deadly plume, West collected various sedimentsamples from 25 archaeology sites across the United States. He used amagnet to find iron flecks reportedly from the comet, scooped up carbonspherules reflecting subsequent fires, and argued that highconcentrations of such material at particular sedimentary levelssupported their theory.

The team has argued a 4-kilometer comet tumbled into ice sheets 12,900 years ago, leading to the so-called Younger Dryas, when the temperature cooled for more than a thousand years.

The flying debris appeared to answer questions about the Clovis peoples'disappearance that had defied prior explanation. The supposed remnantsof the comet hadn't received intense scrutiny by researchers previouslyprobing sediments at archaeology sites. And water from melted iceflowing into the oceans could explain the precipitous temperature drop.

But all these claims have been sharply disputed in a series of scientific articles over the last 18 months. Examples include:

Speaking of the various reports, Surovell said, "We all built a critical mass of data suggesting there was a serious problem."

Now, Boslough and colleagues have conducted new analysis of purportedcomet debris samples that raises even more troubling credibilityquestions.

Comment: Mark Boslough has certainly presented someinteresting work modeling comet impact scenarios using supercomputersat Sandia National Laboratories, but can he really be trusted as anunbiased source of knowledge concerning the hypothetical Younger DryasImpact Event discussed here? His bioon the CSIOP website - an organization known for it's vociferous'debunking' of any scientific ideas that fall outside mainstreamtheories - states:

Mark Boslough is a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories and adjunctprofessor at the University of New Mexico. His work on comet andasteroid impacts has been the subject of many recent TV documentariesand magazine articles. He believes that the impact risk - at itscore - is primarily a climate-change risk, and he has turned hisattention to climate change as a looming national security threat. The opinions expressed here are his own.

And in this statement, the implication is that he is very much on the"pro" side in the Anthropocentric Global Warming debate. An examplewould be this CSIOP article where he attempts to defend climate scientists against those pesky Global Warming "denialists."

Given the data we've gathered here on SOTT, it's difficult to see howone could put the risk of man-made 'Global Warming' at a higher levelthan extraterrestrial impacts, and this calls into question Boslough'sobjectivity in the matter. Like many American scientists, Bosloughseems unable to see the forest for the trees; catastrophic impact eventshave likely happened on the timescale of human history.

On March 25, Boslough reported that radio-carbon dating of a carbonspherule sample shows it is only about 200 years old - an"irregularity" that indicates is it not from the alleged 12,900-year-oldimpact time.

This means that a sample from a layer purporting to show a highconcentration of spherules at the inception of the Younger Dryasactually only was about as old as the Declaration of Independence.

About two years ago, as his doubts on the theory were building, Bosloughcontacted West to secure carbon spherule samples for analysis. Westsent him 16 spherules, purportedly from the Younger Dryas boundarysediment layer at an archaeology site called Gainey in Michigan - alocation with the highest spherule count of studied locations.

Boslough subsequently forwarded the unopened package of spherules to theNational Science Foundation-funded radio-carbon laboratory at theUniversity of Arizona in Tucson. There, a dating specialist randomlyselected a spherule - the one ultimately found to be about 200 yearsold. Boslough reported these results at an American Geophysical Unionconference in Santa Fe, N.M.

Afterward, Boslough said: "I don't think there is any reason to acceptwhat West reported. I have a serious problem with everything from him."

Did someone salt a sediment layer to increase the spherule count? Or didthe 200-year-old sample inadvertently get mixed in somehow? Bosloughsays he can't provide an answer, but there was some form of"contamination."

But an answer is needed, he said: "I wouldn't sweep it under the rug."

After his presentation, West wrote Boslough that he believed that thequestioned sample somehow got mixed naturally over time into a lowersediment layer. Both Kennett and Firestone agreed.

But Vance Holliday,a University of Arizona archaeologist who has studied Clovis sites for30 years, found this explanation nonsensical. Such mixing of spherulesfrom different eras could invalidate any conclusion that higher spherulecounts represented evidence of a comet impact.

After the theory was first announced in 2007 in Acapulco, Mexico,Holliday had attempted to collaborate with Kennett to test the idea. ButKennett effectively blocked publication of the study last year afterthe results didn't support the comet theory.

And those results were blindly analyzed by an independent reviewerselected by Kennett himself. That independent reviewer was none otherthan Walter Alvarez - an esteemed University of California, Berkeley, geologist and son of Luis Alvarez,the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who first proposed an asteroid struckthe Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico about 65 million years ago, wiping outthe world's dinosaurs and most life.

The Holliday-Kennett study has never been presented publicly. Theresults were obtained independent of the two authors. Holliday thenagreed to discuss events; Kennett also answered questions about thestudy but didn't reach the same conclusions as his colleague.

For decades, Holliday has studied a Clovis site at Lubbock Lake Landmark State Historical Parkin Texas, just east of the original location where the Clovis people'sdistinctive fluted projectile points were first discovered in NewMexico. After a visit there in the summer of 2007, Holliday examinedsediments from an exposed section that included the signature of theinception of the Younger Dryas. He then took samples from sixsedimentary layers within a 35-centimeter section encompassing theYounger Dryas.

The study then worked like this: Based on analyses of the layers, bothKennett and Holliday sent to Alvarez their predictions on which layerreflected the geochemical characteristics for the beginning of theYounger Dryas. But neither Kennett nor Alvarez knew the order of thesediment layers; not knowing this order would add credibility to theirconclusions.

In a surprise, Kennett's analysis included sedimentary counts for whathe called nanodiamonds - which his group says were produced by theenormous energy from comet explosion.

Holliday accurately predicted what layer was associated with the YoungerDryas boundary. But Kennett did not. Kennett's selectednanodiamond-rich layer was 25 centimeters above the Younger Dryasboundary - meaning it was about 1,000 years younger than the claimedimpact time. To Alvarez, this indicated a comet-impact hypothesis wasincorrect.

Comment: Given that the sedimentary counts fornanodiamonds is just one piece of evidence in a much larger hypothesis,claiming that this result invalidates the comet-impact hypothesis isakin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

After considerable behind-the-scenes arguing, Holliday said, Kennettultimately complained last summer that the study was "fundamentallyflawed" and wouldn't allow him to publish his results. Now, Kennettsays, he is continuing to analyze the data.

"It is very peculiar," Holliday said. "They propose an idea, a studycontradicts it, then they criticize the scientists or the work."

Both Kennett and Columbia's Broecker, are elected members of theprestigious U.S. National Academy of Science; near age peers, they arealso old friends. Years ago, Broecker noted, Kennett published seminaldiscoveries on ancient climate shifts by studying cores drilled deepinto the ocean floor.

Speaking graciously of Kennett, Broecker lauded his friend's earlyclimate studies as extremely important. But when the comet theory camealong, Broecker immediately was highly skeptical. Kennett repeatedlycalled him to lobby for the comet until Broecker cut him off saying hedidn't want to hear about the theory anymore.

"It is all wrong," said Broecker, if not "very likely total nonsense. But he never gives up on an idea."

Kennett seems fixated on the Younger Dryas, Broecker added, "He won't listen to anyone. It's almost like a religion to him."

About 20 years ago, Broecker noted Kennett had proposed a similarlywayward theory that a burst of methane from the ocean floor -sometimes called "a methane gun" - warmed the climate, ending theYounger Dyras.

"He pushed the methane-gun theory for years," said Broecker. "Hepredicted an enormous methane peak would be reflected in ice-corerecords. But there wasn't one; it was a ridiculous idea to begin with."

Then he switched to the beginning of the Younger Dryas, Broecker added,"He was determined to make a splash; it blinded his judgment."

Ironically, he may be making a different type of impact with his odd-couple collaboration with West.

West has no formal appointment at an academic institution. He has saidhe obtained a doctorate from a Bible college, but he won't describe itfurther. Firestone said West has told him he has no scientific doctoratebut is self-taught. West's Arizona attorney refers to him in writingas: "A retired geophysicist who has had a long and distinguishedcareer."

In the early 1990s, a new-age business West was involved in Sedona,Ariz., failed, and his well-drilling company went bankrupt. Then he ranafoul of California law in small Mojave Desert towns in a scheme withtwo other men, with court records saying they collected fees up to$39,500 for questionable groundwater reports.

He originally was charged with two felonies for falsely representinghimself as a state-licensed geologist but agreed to a no contest plea toa single misdemeanor of false advertising as part of plea bargain inwhich state records say he was fined $4,500. Two other men in the scamalso were sanctioned.

Acknowledging he made a mistake, West has sought to downplay the9-year-old conviction. And last September, after his impact theorycolleagues learned of it, he went back to court in Victorville, Calif.,convincing a judge to void the old plea.

Comment: And what, exactly, does a 9-year-oldconviction have to do with any of the scientific data that West hascollected anyways? Again, we see that instead of tackling all of the data presented by West, Firestone, et al., they've chosen to discredit the messenger in a ad hominem style attack.

After earlier denying any impropriety with his Younger Dryas work,West declined a recent interview request. Last month, he wrote a lettercharging it was "highly prejudicial and distorted" tobring up his legal past in the context of his current studies. He is amember of "a group of two dozen dedicated scientists performingcutting-edge, although controversial, research," he wrote.

Initially last year, Kennett was speechless when confronted with West'shistory. He and Firestone learned of it because of this reporter'squestions. Since then, he has continued to collaborate and publishresearch with West. Within weeks of learning of West's background,Kennett pushed for news coverage last September of an article contendingnanodiamonds in Greenland supported their comet theory. But the article didn't sway critics.

Today, Kennett won't discuss West's criminal past at all -saying West is "wonderful, an absolutely remarkable researcher."Firestone acknowledges West "did some strange things" but continues todefend that his work is above reproach.

Among the theory's critics, there are decidedly differing opinions.

"This is so far beyond the pale - outside of normal experiences inconducting science - you can't ignore it," Southern Illiois' Pintersaid. Asked if he would collaborate with West, he said, "I would runscreaming away."

And the three years and research dollars spent on the claim leave abitter memory for some. "My response is not publishable," said Pinter.

Some academic institution needs to thoroughly examine the issue andanswer the obvious questions that abound, critics say. Several said theyalready would have reported the events to administrators at theirrespective universities.

UCSB is the most likely institution to conduct a review, since Kennettused an NSF grant there on comet studies. But this will mean questioningan esteemed faculty member - Kennett - who is seen as having helpedput the campus on the international scientific map.

Among those who believe a formal inquiry should be initiated to determine if there was any misconduct is Jeffrey Severinghaus,an isotopic chemist at the University of California, San Diego'sScripps Institution of Oceanography. An inquiry is the first level ofsuch scrutiny; an investigation that could lead to sanctions wouldfollow if the inquiry finds evidence of impropriety. Such probes havesniffed out questionable data from cases such as the rejected cold fusion claim and the false Korean assertion of cloning human embryos from stem cells.

"Wow," said Severinghaus upon hearing of the latest developments in thecomet theory, which he initially doubted because of his earlier ice-corestudies. "It certainly sounds like there is sufficient evidence tojustify an initial inquiry."

Asked if he would seek such a move, he said, "Absolutely. It is reallyimportant to maintain the public trust in science. That means if thereis a bad apple, it is rooted out and exposed."

Comment: These bozos lost the public trust when they let Climategate pass without demanding an inquiry. Talk about double standards!

Bruce Hanley, UCSB's director of research compliance, declined to beinterviewed, although in an email he wrote that UCSB "is extremelyinterested in maintaining a high level of integrity" in research, andhas a formal process for review of "unacceptable research practices."Such a review is done confidentially.

Meanwhile, the next stop for the comet proponents' road show is Bern,Switzerland. In July, they are scheduled to present research to a major international conference that studies the last 2.5 million years, the quaternary.

With many leading impact scientists in Europe equally skeptical of thetheory, their welcome may be as icy as that period often was.

One of the large regions that tweaks my curiosity about impact eventsin a very big way is an area that extends from eastern New Mexico tojust the other side of Odessa, and Midland, Texas.

In the image below we see a small part of that area near Vaughn, NewMexico. Using Google Earth's historical image feature, we can view thesame place from about 15,000 feet, in images taken at different times ofthe year.

Crater fields of comparable fragment sizes can be found in scattered, locally dense, clusters all the way to central Texas.

Anyone can Google up some images of the Odessa crater, in west Texas.But the big mystery I'm struggling with is, what about all the others?In the world according to Google Earth, the Odessa crater is only oneof thousands liberally scattered among the oil fields of west Texas.In the image you see below, the white lines are dirt roads about 7, or8, meters wide. And each of the clearings that show up as littlerectangles of a half an acre, or so, are the location of an oil wellpump.

Onany other planetary surface in the solar system no one would hesitateto trust their eyes, and call these these what they look like: impactcraters.

I asked NASA's David Morrison what he thought of these things. Heexpressed his doubts that so many craters could be all the same age. Hesaid he thought that a cluster impact event would be "Highly unlikely".Under the prevailing uniformitarian/gradualist geophysical paradigm,his views are typical of most mainstream planetary scientists.

But in March, 2010, W. M. Napier published a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and titled, "Paleolithic extinctions and the Taurid Complex". In it professor Napier points out that:

"The fragmentation of comets is now recognized as a major routeof their disintegration, and this is consistent with the numeroussub-streams and co-moving observed in the Taurid complex."

"The evidence that an exceptionally large (50-100 km) comet entered ashort-period, Earth-crossing orbit during the upper Paleolithic, andunderwent a series of disintegrations, now seems compelling. The idea isnot new, but it has been strengthened by an accumulation of evidencefrom radar studies of the interplanetary environment, from the LDEFexperiment, from numerical simulations of the Taurid complex meteoroidsand 'asteroids', and from the latter's highly significant orbitalclustering around Comet Encke.

The disintegration of this massive Taurid Complex progenitorover some tens of thousands of years would yield meteoroid swarms whichcould easily lead to brief, catastrophic episodes of multiplebombardment by sub-kilometer bolides, and it is tempting to see theevent at ∼ 12,900 BP as an instance of this. Whether itactually happened is a matter for Earth scientists, but from theastronomical point of view a meteoroid swarm is a much more probableevent than a 4 km comet collision."

Most of the academic community assume that large clusters of cometarydebris don't hit the Earth. At least, not in the geologically recentpast. And they will entertain almost any fantastical theory for theformation of these depressions; as long as that theoretical geologicprocess does not involve a sudden catastrophic impact event. Whenlooking for answers, the typical party line is that they are allprobably karst sinkholes, because they are all in limestone.

But there's just too darn many of them. And in too large a variety ofterrains. Any given karst sinkhole is representative of a partialcollapse of a much larger cave system beneath. And if we work from theuniformitarian postulate that these holes in the ground appeared, over agreat span of time, our thinking is still stuck in a box. They are allin exactly the same almost pristine condition. So it's completely nonsequitur to say they represent a long series of repeated events.

There are many thousands of them, in many different terrains. They canbe found in a large variety of sizes in a vast region that includesalmost all of eastern New Mexico, and West Texas. And they average about100 meters in diameter.

Take your pick. Which is more plausible? A giant series ofinter-connecting cave systems covering tens of thousands of squaremiles, with too many large sinkholes as big as a large sports stadium,all breaking the surface, and collapsing, at nearly the same time tocount? Or the giant crater fields caused by the almost simultaneous,late Pleistocene - early Holocene impacts of a very large cluster ofcometary fragments?

I've been asking around, and digging for evidence that someone hasactually done some real science on these things. And all I've been ableto get are wimpy answers that begin with; "Well, most geologists agreethat______", or words to that effect. Heck, I don't care what they'veall decided to agree about. I want to know what they've proven.

As for me, and until proven otherwise, I prefer to trust my own eyes.Those surfaces we see those things in all date to the late Pleistocene.And I'm working from the postulate that they are related to the impactstorms of the Younger Dryas Impacts.

Ameteor that looked as big as the moon swooped over Cranbrook early onSaturday morning. This photo shows the view through the College of theRockies meteor camera. The image is taken through a fish-eye lens withthe horizon shown as a rim around the edge of the circle. North is atthe right of the image, west at the bottom, south to the left and eastat the top.

Witnesses describe a fireball that looked as big as the moon.

An enormous meteor was caught on video as it flew over Cranbrook early on Saturday morning.

A video camera on the roof of the College of the Rockies caught themeteor's flight in a nine-second clip that you can view on the Townsman'sFacebook page.

Physics lab technician Rick Nowell described the sky as the meteor passed over us.

"The dark night sky of Cranbrook was lit up like daylight earlySaturday morning at 2:17 a.m. when a huge meteor rocketed overhead.Appearing as a dim dot at first, high to the north, it rapidly grew intoa big, white ball as big as the moon, with a tail behind it," describedNowell.

"It flared into brilliance, lighting up the whole sky and layers ofwhite clouds to the south-western horizon. Within four seconds the flaresank as it moved a bit south of west, sinking down into the clouds,towards the setting moon and Creston. Then a dull rumble of thunderfollowed after it."

The fireball was seen east in Cochrane, south in Coeur d'Alene andSpokane, and west in Nelson, Kamloops and Penticton. Most eye-witnessesdescribed a greenish blue orb that looked as big as the moon. Itlit up the sky as bright as day, and one person even said the automaticstreet lights switched off for a few minutes as they registered thelight.

Eyewitnesses in Cranbrook and Nelson heard a distant boom, like afar-off thunderstorm, after the meteor sank over the horizon. That's anindication that the meteor broke apart and fell to the ground somewherebetween the two cities, according to Dr. Alan Hildebrand, head of theCanadian Fireball Reporting Centre at the University of Calgary.

"Those booms can be explosions as the meteor was fragmenting late inflight or if you're close you can hear the sonic booms from individualfragments," said Dr. Hildebrand.

From the angle of the meteor's flight path, Hildebrand estimated thatmeteor fragments may have landed somewhere north of Creston alongKootenay Lake. However, he said, another video taken west of the meteorwould help pinpoint where it came down.

Part of an asteroid, the meteor fragments would not have caused damagewhen they fell - unless it came down right on top of a home.

"It's a rock moving pretty good, so it would punch a hole in your roofbut that's all we're talking about," said Dr. Hildebrand. "And you'd belucky if it happened. Then you'd have a meteorite landed in your house.It would more than pay for fixing the roof."

An estimated 500 meteorites fall to the Earth's surface each year,although only five or six are recovered and reported to scientists eachyear. Meteorites can be worth up to $1 million.

However, the landscape between Creston and Nelson could easily hide meteorites, Hildebrand said.

"This country is mountainous and forested in large part with relativelynarrow valleys with some cleared land and lakes occupying valleybottoms. The described fireball characteristics and all-sky recordindicate a rock with an initial mass of around 100 kilograms," he said."The general area has a lot of tough ground to search for meteorites, asmost of B.C. is - spectacular scenery generally equals tough meteoritesearching."

If you saw or heard the meteorite, the Townsman would love tohear your account. Call 250-426-5201. You can also report the sightingat the Canadian Meteorites and Impacts Advisory Committee here.

Ameteor that looked as big as the moon swooped over Cranbrook earlySaturday. This photo shows the view through the College of the Rockiesmeteor camera. The image is taken through a fish-eye lens with thehorizon shown as a rim around the edge of the circle.

A meteorite that flew over the Kootenays on Saturday morning wasseen in Nelson and caught on video by a camera on the roof of theCollege of the Rockies in Cranbrook.

It lit up the night sky at 2:17 a.m., according to physics lab technician Rick Nowell.

"Appearing as a dim dot at first, high to the north, it rapidly grewinto a big, white ball as big as the moon, with a tail behind it," hesays.

"It flared into brilliance, lighting up the whole sky andlayers of white clouds to the south-western horizon. Within four secondsthe flare sank as it moved a bit south of west, sinking down into theclouds, towards the setting moon and Creston."

A dull rumble of thunder followed.

The fireball was seen as far east as Cochrane, Alberta; south as Coeurd'Alene and Spokane; and west in Nelson, Kamloops and Penticton.

Most witnesses described a greenish blue orb that looked as big as themoon. It lit up the sky as bright as day, and one person even said theautomatic street lights switched off for a few minutes as theyregistered the light.

Witnesses in Cranbrook and Nelson heard a distant boom, like a far-offthunderstorm, after the meteor sank over the horizon - an indicationthe meteor broke apart and fell to the ground somewhere between the twocities, according to Dr. Alan Hildebrand, head of the Canadian FireballReporting Centre at the University of Calgary.

From the angle of the meteor's flight path, Hildebrand estimates meteorfragments may have landed somewhere north of Creston along KootenayLake.

However, the landscape between Creston and Nelson could easily hidemeteorites, Hildebrand said. "The general area has a lot of tough groundto search ... spectacular scenery generally equals tough meteoritesearching."

Bombardmentsof 'micro-meteorites' on Earth and Mars four billion years ago may havecaused the planets' climates to cool dramatically, hampering theirability to support life, according to research by Imperial scientistspublished on 1 April in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

Micro-meteorites, the size of sugar grains, come from the rockyasteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and are dragged by gravitytowards Earth and Mars. As they enter the planets' upper atmospheres,they heat up to temperatures of approximately 1,000 degrees Celsius andrelease gases, including sulphur dioxide. This sulphur dioxide formsaerosols consisting of solid and liquid particles, which deflectsunlight away from the surface, making the planets cooler.

The researchers studied the effects of the Late Heavy Bombardment, aperiod of time in the early solar system, when meteorite showers lastingaround 100 million years barraged Earth and Mars.

They believe that the high sulphur dioxide levels, together with a Sun30 per cent weaker than today's, could have plunged Earth into an Arcticwinter lasting millions of years, and making conditions for primitivemicrobial life extremely difficult.

Dr Richard Court (Earth Science and Engineering),lead author of the study, said: "These sugar grain sized meteorites areleft over material from the construction of our early solar system,helping to build rocky planets such as Earth and Mars. Our study ishelping us to see how these tiny space rocks could also bringenvironmental devastation on a global scale to early Earth and Mars.

Onlyrecently has science recognised craters for what they really are:evidence of sudden impacts from long ago. Geologists Alex Bevan and KenMcNamara explore our rich heritage of fossil collisions.

Travelling south from Halls Creek in Western Australia, the hillycountry of the southeastern Kimberley quickly gives way to the flat sandplains of the Great Sandy Desert.

Some 90 km south of Halls Creek, we see on the horizon a break in themonotony: an apparently flat-topped hill. In these endless plains, it ishard to judge the hill's height and distance, but after another 10 kmwe are almost there.

The fascinating story of the Wolfe Creek Crater begins to be revealed aswe approach the slopes of the hill: the quartzite country rock becomesincreasingly broken and disarranged. Rusty-red areas of iron oxidesoils, which cap the quartzite, become increasingly fragmented.

Then, curious objects begin to appear. Close to the top of the hill, onits western slopes, rusty balls of rock lie scattered on the ground,sometimes fused into the laterite, and at other times lying loose.

Reaching the top of the hill, we gasp from something other thanshortness of breath - for before us lies one of the most startlinggeological features in Australia: Wolfe Creek Crater.

Between 870 and 950 m in diameter, Wolfe Creek Crater is almostcircular. Originally it would have been 120 m deep, but is now largelyfilled with sand and is only 25 m below the plains of sand.

There are thousands of circular structures on Earth's land surface, andmany of these can be explained by the action of well-understoodgeological processes such as volcanism.

A number of these structures do not occur in volcanic terrains, nor arethey associated with volcanic material. In the past, scientistsdescribed them as 'cryptovolcanic' or 'cryptoexplosion' structures,believing they were the result of explosive eruptive activity or thatthe cause of the explosion is unknown.

In the past 50 years, many features thought to be volcanic have now been shown to have an impact origin.

In 1965, researchers found 1,343 grams of iron meteorites some 3.9 kmsouthwest of Wolfe Creek Crater, making it one of only five craters inAustralia where meteorites have been found.

Meteorites only survive if the impact is small, producing a crater only afew hundreds of metres across. In larger impacts, the projectile iscompletely melted and vaporised. So, without the meteorite itself, whatother than the circularity of such structures leads us to believe theywere formed by impact?

The telltale evidence of a meteoritic origin falls into three maincategories: structural, mineralogical and chemical. Geophysical surveysof many suspected impact structures show that they do not havedeep-seated roots.

For example, Gosses Bluff, about 175 km west of Alice Springs,has a limit to the depth of severely disrupted rocks at around 4 kmbelow the ground, indicating that the cause of the disruption could nothave come from below, as in volcanic eruptions.

But the vital piece of evidence that distinguishes impact craters fromother geological formations is the presence of shock-altered minerals.Shock waves cause microscopic transformations to occur in certainminerals.

The diagnostic features of true impact structures include multiple setsof microscopic planar deformation features in quartz, a mineral that inits unaltered form has no natural cleavage.

Significantly, impact cratering is the only geological process known toproduce these so-called 'shock-metamorphic' effects abundantly.

Other features include impact glasses - melted and rapidly solidifiedrock - and the rare minerals stishovite and coesite, which were formedby the intense compression of the mineral quartz.

In some impact structures - such as Popigai in Russia and the NördlingerRies structure in Germany - the rocks are shot with tiny diamondsformed by the shock-compression of graphite (or carbon); some of thesediamonds may even have condensed from the vapour created by the impact.

Since they survive over great periods of geological time, impactdiamonds are additional useful indicators in the identification ofimpact structures.

Recently, tiny diamonds of impact origin have been recognised withinimpact glass at the Henbury craters, 13 to 14 craters about 150 kmsouthwest of Alice Springs.

On a larger scale, other diagnostic features of intensely shocked rocksare shatter cones, which are produced by the sliding of rocks alongcone-shaped fractures. Like accusing fingers, the apex of each conealways points toward the point of impact.

Shatter cones have not been found at Wolfe Creek, but it is likely thaterosion has not yet penetrated deeply enough to expose the shattercones, which may lie beneath the crater.

Evidence of giant impacts occasionally presents itself in places otherthan at the site of collision. Rocks thrown great distances from cratersgo on to land in alien terrain, and flying glass such as tektite (farfrom the crater) or impactite (close to the crater), remain asincriminating evidence of impacts.

Asteroids hitting seas and oceans raise giant tsunamis that break onland, depositing muddy sediments and other debris as they flow acrosshundreds of kilometres. Ejecta in the form of breccias - broken bits ofrock cemented together - are either hurled, or flow considerably farfrom the crater from which they were ejected.

Pseudotachylite is an unusual kind of impact breccia that occurs deep inthe target rocks of some large impact structures. In composition,pseudotachylites correspond closely to their adjacent host rocks,indicating that they formed from them by grinding, and sometimesfrictional, melting.

Pseudotachylites can occur as thin, millimetre-sized veins, or bodies upto many tens of metres thick. They can contain numerous large and smallrounded inclusions of milled target rock, set in a dense matrix that isgenerally black to blackish-green in colour. Pseudotachylite-like rocksare not exclusive to impact structures but also occur in zones ofintense deformation, such as faults. They can result from sharp tectonicmovements.

Bodies of tectonic pseudotachylite tend to be linear and less than a fewmetres thick, whereas impact-produced pseudotachylites can form large,more irregular bodies developed over wide areas.

Pseudotachylites then, are themselves not necessarily diagnostic ofimpacts unless they are accompanied by other evidence ofshock-metamorphism. When pseudotachylites are present in impactstructures, the melt-rich varieties offer a means of absolute age datingof the impact event.

In many impact craters, gas from the vapourised projectile can beinjected into the target rocks, leaving a distinctive chemicalsignature.

The type of signature depends on the make-up of the meteoritic culprit,and it has been possible in some cases to identify the type of impactingmeteorite from analysis of the melted rocks that form the impactstructure.

An example of telltale signs of a giant impact occurring in a placeother than the impact site is the recognition of the Lake Acramanstructure in the Gawler Ranges of South Australia as a huge scar ofextraterrestrial origin.

In 1983, geologists, including Vic Gostin working in the Flinders Rangessome 300 km east of Lake Acraman, discovered a layer of shatteredvolcanic rock fragments, some up to 30 cm across, encased in600-million-year-old shales in the Pichi Richi Pass and other spotsthroughout the ranges.

Dating of the 'foreign' rocks showed that they were around one billionyears older than the shales in which they had become embedded.

Recognising that the rock fragments were typical of ancient volcanicrocks found at the Gawler Ranges, near Lake Acraman, the geologistsdeduced that they must have come from there: but how?

Independently, in 1979, another geologist, George Williams, haddiscovered abundant evidence of shocked mineral grains and shatter conesin the volcanic rocks exposed on the shores of the nearly circular LakeAcraman, and concluded that it was an impact structure.

Eventually, the geologists compared notes and realised that the rockfragments found in the Flinders Ranges represented some of the debrishurled from the impact at Lake Acraman. The estimated age of the hostshales pinned down the time of the impact to around 600 million yearsago.

At the time of the Lake Acraman impact, a shallow sea existed in thearea now occupied by the Flinders Ranges. Debris from the impact raineddown on the sea and sank into the muddy seabed, which later becameburied by other sediments.

Subsequent upheavals raised and contorted the accumulated sediments thatnow form the Flinders Ranges, and erosion has exposed the 'fossilised'remains of the fallout from the Acraman impact.

The original Acraman crater, which formed some one or two kilometresabove the present land surface, was at least 30 km in diameter; butcircular fractures around the impact indicate that the final collapsecrater could have been as much as 40-90 km in diameter. This makes itone of the 10 largest known impact structures in the world, and theenergy released during its formation was around a million times greaterthan at Wolfe Creek.

Recently, satellite photography and extensive geophysical explorationhave revealed some 200 circular structures that may have been formed bygiant meteorite impacts on Earth's surface and beneath the oceans.

Many circular features, some up to 100 km or more in diameter, have beenobserved as ghostly outlines in some of the oldest rocks on Earth.

Like Australia, other ancient continental landscapes such as theCanadian Shield, South Africa, Siberia and the Scandinavian Shielddisplay faint circular scars that testify to the impact of hugeasteroids millions of years ago.

Once earth's geological history has been detailed, it can revealhow often these potentially destructive bodies strike Earth.Crater-forming meteoroids - those weighing a few hundred tonnes or more -would be expected to strike Earth's land surface every 20 years or so.

Theoretically, a meteoroid big enough to produce a crater the size ofWolfe Creek - tens of thousands of tonnes - should arrive on Earth aboutonce every 5,000 years.

However, a crater-forming impact on this scale has not occurred inhistorical times. The reason is that Earth is not without its naturaldefences, and there are a number of factors that work in our favour.

Since three quarters of Earth's surface is covered by water, mostmeteorites fall into the sea. Also, the majority of meteorites arebrittle objects and break up in the atmosphere to fall as many smallobjects rather than one large one.

Studies of craters show that many were made by the impact of ironmeteorites, which are less prone to break-up in the atmosphere, but farless common than stony meteorites.

When all the factors are taken into account, impact-producing structureson the scale of Wolfe Creek are predicted to occur perhaps once every25,000 years, while collisions on the Lake Acraman and Gosses Bluffscale only about once every 15 million years. Potentially catastrophicglobal events like the Chicxulub impact, which might cause extinctions,may only occur on a time scale of 50-100 million years.

Realistically, what are the chances of a catastrophic impact onEarth? If the fossil-cratering record is anything to go by, over thevast time-scale of geological history, catastrophic impacts havecertainly occurred and are indeed likely to occur again in the future.

Humanity's written history is very short - a few thousand years or so;this pales into insignificance against the 4.6 billion years of Earth'sgeological history. And just because large-scale cratering has notoccurred during historical times, this does not mean it will not happenin the future.

CAN WE STOP THE NEXT ONE?

Since 1998, there's been a coordinated hunt for Near Earth Objects, orNEOs: asteroids or comets that cross the Earth's orbit and are up to 195million km from the Sun (Earth is 150 million km from the Sun).

Australian astronomers use the 0.5 m Uppsala Schmidt Telescope at SidingSpring Observatory, in Coonabarabran, New South Wales - the only surveyin the southern hemisphere.

Multiple images of the same patch of sky are taken 15 minutes apart andcompared - enough time to spot a NEO crossing the frame. Unfortunately,only NEOs 1 km in diameter or more are easily detectable, and the workis funded by NASA since Australian funding dried up over a decade ago.

To date, the surveys have found 7,679 NEOs. Of these, 1,180 asteroidsare classed as 'potentially hazardous': passing within 7.5 millionkilometres of Earth and being at least 110 m in diameter. Each new NEO'sorbit is calculated to establish if it will collide with Earth in thefuture.

If one was identified as a threat, existing technology might be able todeflect it. One technique suggested is to set off hydrogen bombs aboveits surface: high-speed neutrons from the blast would irradiate one sideof the asteroid, causing material to expand and blow off.

The asteroid would recoil, producing a small change in velocity - enoughto make it eventually miss Earth. Blowing up the asteroid entirelywould create an even bigger problem, since all the pieces would still beheaded for Earth. Another idea is to attach large solar sails to theobject, allowing the pressure of sunlight to redirect the object awayfrom Earth.

There may even be a commercial spin-off from NEO studies: thepotentially hazardous comets and asteroids are the ones that could mosteasily be captured in Earth's orbit and mined for metals such asplatinum and cobalt.

Back in 1996, after the initially very mysterious explosion and crash of Flight 800from JFK to Rome, there were numerous eyewitness accounts of a "streakin the sky" just before the crash. This led to the "missile theory" ofthe crash, which was eventually attributed to the explosion of the center fuel tankby the NTSB. But, also at the time, it was suggested that a meteor ofsufficient size could have struck the plane, bringing it down.

Could a meteor have brought down Air France 447? Today we arestarting to see reports that there actually may have been a meteor:

However, both pilots of an Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon sent awritten report on the bright flash they said they saw to Air France,Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority, the airline told CNN.

"Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of whitelight, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and whichbroke up in six seconds," the captain wrote.

Obviously for any given flight the chances are very, very smallthat a meteor will bring down an airliner, but as Hailey and Helfand pointed out in a letter to the NYTin 1996, the correct question to ask is this: "What is the probabilitythat, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by ameteor?" They concluded that there was a 1-in-10 chance that this could happen...let's use their logic, brought up to date somewhat, for 2009, for Flight 447.

Comment: And judging from the recent increased activity, the chances are probably even higher than that.

Helfand, an astronomer, is presumably the one who estimated that"approximately 3,000 meteors a day with the requisite mass strikeEarth". This is a difficult number to get. How much mass? How fast doesit need to be moving? But let's assume that this number is correct; ittranslates to 125 meteors per hour.

Next we need to know the total number of flight hours at altitude for all commercial planes. In 2000 there were about 18 million flights per year.Clearly in the past 20 years (which we'll take as our reference, sinceit spans 1989-2009, with both flights 800 and 447) it was not alwaysso...but let's take a guess that the 18 million figure is roughlycorrect for that 20 year period. That would yield 360 million commercialairline flights from 1989-2000. Hailey and Helfand assumed that eachflight was two hours in duration. Again, a tough number to find on line,so we'll take it at face value, giving us 720 million flight hours inour reference period.

They also claim that if there were 3500 planes in the air at any time,this would correspond to covering two-billionths of Earth's surface. Nowthe earth's surface area is 5×1014 m2. Using my trusty HP-15c, I get that this would imply an average target area for a commercial airliner of 291 m2, which is reasonable. Each plane, that is, covers 5.7×10-13 of Earth's surface. If a meteor hits the earth it has that probability of hitting a given plane on average.

So, in our reference 20-year period we have 720 million hours of flight time, times 125 meteors per hour, times 5.7×10-13= 0.051, which we can take as the average number of airliners struck bymeteors in the period 1989-2009. That's a one-in-twenty chance of someplane going down for this reason in that 20 year period. Extrapolatingto all flights ever would require a better estimate of total flighthours, but it's not twenty times the number in the past 20 years, forsure - that is, it's not yet close to one.

Obviously there are a lot of uncertainties in this estimate; perhaps afactor of two from the number of meteors of sufficient mass per day, theaverage flight duration and number of flights?

Anyway the meteor idea is not crazy, though not likely. The weatherseems more likely to be at the root of the tragedy...but we may neverknow. One thing, though, is clear: if we keep flying big planes at highaltitude, eventually one will get hit by a meteor.

Astronomers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center have recorded thebrightest meteor seen by their network in almost three years ofoperation. On May 20, 2011, at 9:47 p.m. CDT, a six-foot diameterfragment of an unknown comet entered the atmosphere approximately 66miles above the city of Macon, Ga., traveling northwest at a speed ofsome 24 miles per second (86,000 mph). At this velocity, theboulder-sized "dirty snowball" possessed an energy or striking powersomewhere between 500-1000 tons of TNT.

This was seen by many eyewitnesses in Georgia and Alabama; the American Meteor Society has some of the reports here.

It was tracked by two NASA all sky cameras, one located in Chickamauga,Ga., and the other at the Tellus Science Museum in the town ofCartersville, Ga. Analysis of the video data from these cameras enabledthe Meteoroid Environment Office to estimate the trajectory, speed, massand orbit of the meteor. More information on these cameras and a log ofrecent meteor events can be found here.

Fortunatelythe atmosphere provided us with excellent protection, as the videoillustrates. Because the video is slowed to one-third of the actualreal-time speed, it's easy to spot the large fragments coming off in thewake after the flares.

The video shows four distinct flares caused by the meteor breaking apartin its fiery final few seconds. You can see fragments coming off in themeteor's wake after three of these flares. After a last burst of light,the meteor ablated -- or "burned up" -- 38 miles above the town ofVilla Rica, Ga., located on the border between Carrol and Douglascounties in Georgia.

Amystery 'boom' that 'may not have been explosion' caused panic innortheast Philadelphia and Lower Bucks County at approximately 9:30 PM,May 27, 2011, according to a local NBC report, with multiple firetrucks, EMS, and power companies racing to the 'scene'. After reachingthe area, no one could locate the source of an explosion. Also reported,house's shook which led to speculation it may have been an earthquake.According to NBC 7 the USGS was unable to confirm the boom was anearthquake. Other speculation, a sonic boom which was heard in onlynortheast Philadelphia and Lower Bucks County.

NBC 10 Philadelphia video news report:

'Calls and emails flooded NBC 10 News after reports of several loudbangs. This is in northeast Philadelphia and Lower Bucks County. Fireand emergency units raced to the scene but it is still not clear whathas happened here.'

The local NBC reporter:

'This is a very strange situation out here you can see behind me thereare multiple crews from the fire department and the police department aswell as crews from PICO and PGW. This is the area of 9th and FairdaleRd. in Northeast Philadelphia. Here's what we know, at about 9:30tonight the fire department started getting multiple calls of what somepeople described as a possible explosion. Some people I've been talkingto at the scene said that it actually felt like a minor earthquake.Whatever it was at this point investigators have not been able todetermine what that explosion was or if it even was an explosion butpeople said it lasted only a few seconds.'

One witness: 'It sounded like something above you, fell down.'

Another witness: 'It sounded like something hit the building, like acar. It was just a shake and that's when the cops and everything werehere. And someone said a house blew up and everyone came running out andno one knows what it is.'

"FinalFrontier Voyage" - when will today's equivalents of yesterday's flatworld theorists wake up and see what's on the horizon?

Hi Dr. West,

I've been following the latest news. And I thought you could use a bit of moral support.

It probably sounds crazy for a certified welding inspector andironworker to retire and pursue impact research full-time. Especiallysince I'm pretty much a nobody. But like many others, I'm looking toidentify the planetary scarring and blast-affected materials of theimpact storms of the Early Holocene. A little military training inbattle damage assessment from aerial photography and a copy of GoogleEarth goes a long way here.

And being a nobody makes me especially sensitive to ad hominemattacks. I am prepared to debate the science I propose with the bigkids. But as an autodidact, an outsider and a complete nobody, I have nodefense if the attacks are personally about me, and not the science. Sowhenever I'm reading along and one side or another, in any givendebate, sinks to ad hominem, I have a policy of looking past itat the science that's being ignored or smoke-screened. I tend tomentally disqualify any debater who sinks to such small-minded tactics,and ignore further comments from them in the future. And from what I seeof it, the science of yours I see smoke-screened by all the ad hominem crap in the popular press lately is, nevertheless, as good as it gets.

Like you and the others of Firestone et al, what I've been ableto find pretty much flies in the face of the kind ofUniformitarian/Gradualist assumptive reasoning that's been thefoundation postulate of the Earth Sciences since Sir Charles Lyellpublished Principles of Geology back in 1830. And regarding theevents of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, I'm ready to make thecase that the foundation geologic principle in the Earth sciences,expressed in the slogan, "The present is the key to the past", is almostas naïve as flat-world theory.

The principles of Uniformitarianism, and Gradualism, only workas long as nothing sudden, and chaotic happens. Harlan Bretz was able touse aerial photography to identify, and map, catastrophic mass movementof terrain materials. And in his work on the Channeled Scablands ofEastern Washington, and the glacial Mega floods of the early Holocene,Bretz showed us that if you want to understand the planetary scarring ofa geologically recent catastrophic event that's different from anythinganyone's ever studied before, and more violent than anything that'sever been imagined before, that 19th century gradualist assumptivereasoning just won't get you there.

And when you crank up the violence from a glacial flood, to a continental scale, mass extinction impact event, Sir Charles's 19th century Principles of Geology becomes completely useless, and obsolete.

The biggest flaw I see in Firestone et al isn't related to yourpart in it anyway. It's in the objection raised by Mark Boslough thatit's impossible to construct a model with a four mile wide bolide thathas enough time in the atmosphere to break up completely, and scatterfragments over such a large area without making a large cratersomewhere. Mark's right about that. But that doesn't invalidate the YD(Younger-Dryas) impact hypothesis. It just means that Firestone et al weren't working from a valid astronomical model for the event.

But his concerns are more than answered in Clube, and Napier's work on the Taurid Complex. In Paleolithic extinctions, and the Taurid Complex,Bill Napier points out that the breakup of comets is now a wellrecognized path to their destruction. And if we look at images of thefragments of Comet LINEAR, or Comet Scwassmann-Wachmann 3, both typicaldaughters of the Taurid Complex, we can see he's probably right. The YDimpact events were the debris of the Taurid progenitor. And it wasalready a very large cloud of cometary debris before it got anywherenear the Earth.

When you plug a workable, and probable, astronomical model into theYD impact hypothesis it becomes a full blown theory that can predict theplanetary scarring.

If you can describe a beast you can predict it's footprints.I asked David Morrison what he thought of the idea of a cluster impactevent, and he was understandably skeptical. He said he thought it was"highly unlikely" But when you consider the typical fragile, oftenfragmented, and sometimes volatile, nature of many of the Taurid familyobjects we've been able to image, and study so far, you'll see that, infact, a cluster event of small fragments should thought of as the mostlikely kind of catastrophic impact event. Not a single, large bolide.

And when you toss Sir Charles's unquestioned, 19th centuryuniformitarian assumptive reasoning out the window, stop pretending thatcatastrophic impact events don't happen, and go looking for thegeologically recent planetary scarring of large clusters of smallerfragments. That planetary scarring is not hard to find.

I'm staring to feel like the outside observer in the story of the blind man and the elephant. And I see a few great scientists bickering, and seemingly disagreeing, who are all correct.

In the geophysical world according to me, Firestone et al wereright. The YD was caused by an impact event. But they were mistaken, inthat they didn't realize that it wasn't a single large bolide when itfirst hit the atmosphere. They also didn't realize that the Great lakesregion was only one of two major impact zones. The other was centralMexico, and much of the American southwest. In the final analysis I think it will be determined that they were too conservative in their estimate of only 109 megatons of destruction.

I think we can also show that Clube & Napier were right that theparent comet was the Taurid progenitor. They put the estimate atsomething like 1.1 billion tons that impacted in those multiple fragmentimpact storms as a "reasonably probable" event. They are correct thatthe most probable scenario for a catastrophic impact event is a largecluster of smaller fragments. And not a single large bolide.

Bill Napier told me that he had a problem with the figure of temps as high as 107°C. He said that even if something hits at 30 km/s, and 100% of it'skinetic energy was translated to heat in the atmosphere it's hard to getmore than 105 °C. But when you think it through from theperspective of a large cluster of fragments like the fragments of cometlinear, then you get to a situation where only the first fragments tofall actually fall into cold atmosphere. The rest are falling into thealready superheated impact plumes of the ones before them. And they justcrank up the heat. The temps given in Firestone et al don't seem such a stretch when you look at it like that.

Finally, Mark Boslough, and Horton Newsom are correct about the geo-ablative potential of large airbursts.

The blast effected materials of a geo-ablative airburst are similar inform to a pyroclastic flow. But where the motive force during theemplacement for a volcanogenic flow is gravity, the motive force duringthe emplacement of a formation of airburst melt is the ablative winds ofthe airburst. In both cases, and while in motion, the particles, andfragments of rock, are in atmospheric suspension, in a fluidized flow,or density current. But the different motive forces involved result indifferent patterns of movement, and flow. And those patterns are asvisually distinct as the differences between dogs, and cats.

Forensically speaking, it doesn't matter if it's volcanogenic, orexogenic. As a component of a pyroclastic density current, that stuff isthe blast effected material of an explosive event. And if you want tounderstand an explosive event, you begin by studying the motions of theblast effected materials.

When you find orphan deposits of ignimbrites in pristine condition, andthe source remains a mystery. And from a high altitude you seewind-driven patterns of movement, and flow, like the debris laden froth,and foam, on a storm tossed beach, you've found the footprints of ageo-ablative monster.

Geologically the Chihuahuan ignimbrites are almost completely unstudied.And less than 100 miles along the highway between Chihuahua City, andEl Paso has even been mapped. But in north central Mexico, and theSierra Madre Occidental mountains you will find more than 350,000 cubicmiles of pristine ignimbrites that look like they just cooled last year.Less than 15% can be attributed to a volcano. And the 'Orphan'materials all display wind-driven patterns of flow in their emplacement.And the reason that generations of geologists haven't been ableto locate a volcanic system to blame all that stuff on is because itdidn't come out of the ground. The direction of flow is aslegible as spilled paint in a driveway. The source locations are thesimply the bare areas behind the flows.

I doubt that I'll live long enough to see the Earth sciences toss SirCharles's obsolete uniformitarian conditioning. But the planetaryscarring of the YD impacts is only a few thousand years old. Theemplacement of the pristine blast effected materials can be read at aresolution of better than 1 meter per pixel. And it's not hard to spot.Except by those who can't believe in catastrophic events, and won'tlook.

In spite of the hype of the popular press, I see the scientific legacyof you, and your colleagues, as having a comfortable place in theHistory books.

Comment: Interesting. Considering U.S. GeologicalSurvey's claims, we have to ask how come Japan's 9.8 magnitudeearthquake wasn't followed by terrible and deafening explosions? And weare not talking about the consequences of the devastating tsunami. Is itreally too hard to consider the possibility that the earthquake wascaused by the "loud bang" and not the other way around?

The USGS reports that the depth of the quake was 4.2 km (2.6 miles).

The site also says that it hit 2 miles from Cornwells Heights-Eddington,PA, 4 miles from Beverly, NJ, 5 miles from Riverton, NJ and 10 milesfrom Philadelphia.

People all over the Northeast and in nearby places likeBensalem, Pa. were reporting having heard an explosion or boom in thearea of Knights and Fairdale Road around 9:35 p.m., according to thePhiladelphia Fire Department.

Soonafter a huge solar storm erupted on May 20-21, 2011, a comet (brightstreak at lower right) plunged into the sun. This shot is a still from avideo taken by one of NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft.

A sun-watching spacecraft has recorded views of an ill-fated cometplunging into the sun just after a huge solar eruption - the secondtime in 10 days that a comet dive-bombed Earth's star during a solarstorm.

Over May 20 and 21, the sun unleashed a big coronal mass ejection(CME), an immense burst of plasma that sent solar particles streakinginto space at fantastic speeds. Shortly thereafter, a kamikaze cometbarreled into the sun. And one of NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft caughtit all on video, agency officials announced last week.

"Soon after [the eruption], as a bonus visual, a sun-grazing comet camestreaking in (from the right) heading for the sun," NASA officials saidin a May 27 statement. "Its tail could be seen elongating substantiallyas it approached the sun and apparently disintegrated."

This dramatic series of events followed closely on the heels of asimilar spectacle less than two weeks earlier. Between May 10 and May11, NASA's SOHO spacecraft spotted a different comet diving toward thesun, never to be seen again. A massive CME erupted at about the sametime.

Scientists think the confluence of solar storms and suicidalcomets is purely coincidental. There is no evidence of any physicalconnection between the two, NASA officials have said.

Both of the recent kamikaze comets are thought to belong to theso-called Kreutz family of comets. Kreutz comets have orbits thatapproach within a few hundred thousand miles of the sun.

All Kreutz comets are thought to be the remains of one giant comet thatbroke apart several centuries ago. They are named after 19th centuryastronomer Heinrich Kreutz, who first demonstrated that such comets wererelated.

Coronal mass ejections shoot charged particles from the sun over severalhours. Such solar eruptions can spew up to 10 billion tons of plasmaand expand away from the sun at speeds topping 1 million mph, NASAofficials have said.

When these solar particles hit Earth's magnetic field, they can causemassive "geomagnetic storms," which have the potential to wreaklong-lasting havoc on power and communications infrastructure around theglobe.

But the effects of CMEs are not all bad. The particles can also produce the spectacular light shows that we know as auroras (in the Northern Hemisphere, these displays are called the aurora borealis, or northern lights).

The sun is in the midst of an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle. The current cycle is known as Solar Cycle 24.

Comment: The mental gymnastics NASA scientists must undergo to really believe their own nonsense is breathtaking!

Are they just willfully ignorant? Or are they intentionally covering upthe glaringly obvious truth that comets interact electrically with ourSun, causing it to discharge enormous amounts of energy in the form ofsolar flares, CMEs, etc.?

In his book Planet X, McCanney claims that NASA personnel are"prohibited from disclosing to the public anything that would cause anational panic" (p.83) Like the 'in the interest of national security'excuse cited in the War on Terror™, this excuse about 'not wanting tocause a national panic' is wearing a little thin. So thin, in fact, thatit has become transparent and, thanks to researchers and realscientists like James McCanney, we can see straight through it.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

I was at my parents in corn okla. may 7 2011 , sitting out back around ten,and saw a fireball in eastern sky. It was very impressive with bright blues and reds and yellows. steep angle of decent. Looked like it was close enough to fall between corn okla. and okla. city.